Anthology As a Mirror of the Post-Wwii Ukrainian Literature
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DOI: 10.14746/por.2018.2.4 A WRITER OR A CREATOR OF THE TEXTUAL WORLD: ANTHOLOGY AS A MIRROR OF THE POST-WWII UKRAINIAN LITERATURE olEna HalEta1 (Львівський національний університет імені Івана Франка; Український Католицький Університет) Słowa kluczowe: antologia, pisarz, literatura ukraińska, mit, wspólnota czytania Keywords: anthology, writer, Ukrainian literature, myth, reader community Abstrakt: Olena Haleta, PISARZ, CZYLI TWÓRCA ŚWIATA TEKSTOWEGO: ANTOLOGIA JAKO ZWIERCADŁO LITERATURY UKRAIŃSKIEJ PO II WOJNIE ŚWIATOWEJ, „PORÓWNA- NIA” 2 (23), 2018 T. XXIII, S. 47-62. ISSN 1733-165X. Po II wojnie światowej antologia literacka staje się jednym z najważnejszych sposobów reprezentacji literatury ukraińskiej, który zmienia się w zależności od definiowania i redefiniowania statusu pisarza. Podczas gdy w literaturze radziec- kiej pod opieką Akademii Nauk pojawiają się wydania wielotomowe, konstruujące postać pisarza jako uczestnika socjalistycznej reorganizacji rzeczywistości, antologie emigracyjne rozwijają mit o pisarzu jako twórcy świata słów, stającego się nową „przestrzenią spotkania” dla całej wspólno- ty kulturowej.Antologie literackie opublikowane po upadku Związku Radzieckiego (których licz- ba rośnie wielokrotnie) odzwierciedlają wszystkie problemy transformacji tożsamości autorów od wieszcza do gracza w niepewnej rzeczywistości, a także różne modele mitologizacji twórczości od romantyzmu do postmodernizmu. W tym kontekście szczególnie widoczna staje się zmiana natury gatunkowej antologii, która stopniowo przechodzi z kolekcji do projektu. Z jednej strony zauważalny jest efekt komercjalizacji literatury w warunkach rynkowych, przekształcenie pisarza w „producenta” towaru tekstowego. Z drugiej strony, obok klasycznego pisarza, który w uzna- wany przez czytelników sposób reprezentuje wartości estetyczne, powstaje postać pisarza jako in- telektualisty publicznego, podejmującego wyzwanie tworzenia nowych zmysłów i nowych form wypowiedzi na aktualne tematy. Abstract: Olena Haleta, A WRITER OR A CREATOR OF THE TEXTUAL WORLD: ANTHOLO- GY AS A MIRROR OF THE POST-WWII UKRAINIAN LITERATURE, “PORÓWNANIA” 2 (23), 1 E-mail: [email protected] 47 Porównania_23.indd 47 2019-03-18 11:27:47 OLENA HALETA, A WRITER OR A CREATOR OF THE TEXTUAL WORLD… 2018 VOL. XXIII, P. 47-62. ISSN 1733-165X. After the II World War, literary anthology has become one of the most important means of representing Ukrainian literature, and it has changed de- pending on the definition and redefinition of the writer’s status. In the meantime, in the Soviet literature under the supervision of the Academy of Sciences, there appear multi-volume editions constructing the figure of the writer as a participant in the socialist reorganization of reality, em- igration anthologies develop the myth of the writer as the creator of the textual world, becoming a new “common place” for the entire cultural community. Literary anthologies published after the collapse of the USSR (whose number has grown manyfold) reflect all the problems of trans- forming the identity of the author from the prophet to the player in an uncertain reality, as well as various models of mythologizing creativity from romanticism to postmodernism. In this context, the change in the genre of anthology becomes especially noticeable; it gradually moves from the collection to the project. On the one hand, commercialization of literature in market conditions and the transformation of the writer into a “producer” of textual goods are visible. On the other hand, next to the classic writer who, in a manner recognized by readers, represents aesthetic val- ues, there emerges the figure of a writer as a public intellectual who undertakes the challenge of creating new meanings and new forms of expression on current issues. Since the 19th century, anthologies have played an important role in the history of Ukrainian literature and in the general process of the formation of the national cultural community. All while the national literary tradition and canon were being established, Ukrainian literature was deprived of powerful culture-creative mecha- nisms, in particular the national system of education and periodicals as an essential prerequisite for the development of literary criticism. In the Ukrainian tradition, however, the anthology as an “important niche of the literary sphere” (Pavlyshyn 84) differs in its structure and functions from the textbook or chrestomathy. If this latter is a part of a canon-oriented curriculum, then the anthology serves as a means of rapid reaction to cultural and literary changes, and is not limited by education- al needs. While textbooks and readers work on the principle of repetition for the approval of canonical lists of names and works, anthologies present the actual lit- erature in accordance with the understanding of the status and role of the writer. Such representations are implicitly manifested in different compilation strategies reflecting the “author’s myths” in various reader communities. Not only classical collections but also those less noticeable at the time of its release often become sig- nals of changes in the collective imagination and cultural formations. Anthology as a genre: constructing cultural identity. Anthologies remained aside the strong interests of literary theorists for a long time both in Ukraine and abroad. Several researchers addressed this topic no sooner than the 1990s, although first attempts to consider collective editions as a special kind of creativity appeared in writings by the formalists. In 1928 Viktor Shklovsky wrote: “now a journal can exist only as a specific literary form. It should repose not only on the captivation of individual parts, but on the captivation of their connection as well” (Shklovsky 114, 116). In turn, Yury Tynyanov qualified journals as literary phenomena (Tynyanov 1977a, 147) stressing that “journals and almanacs existed in the past, but only now- 48 Porównania_23.indd 48 2019-03-18 11:27:47 PORÓWNANIA NR 2 (23), 2018 adays they are perceived as peculiar “literary works”, “literary facts”” (Tynyanov 1977b, 257). To analyse “secondary” cultural phenomena Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed the term “bricolage”, indicating that elements previously included in other integrities change their function in the newly created whole (Lévi-Strauss 16-22). According to Gerard Genette, terminologically an anthology should be considered as solid “liter- ature in the second degree” whose fragments are not only marked by an individual authorship, but are also linked by contextual (the order of text fragments in an an- thology), architextual (intra-genre), metatextual (expressed through prefaces, post- faces, biographic sketches, interpretations and self-interpretations) connections (see Genette). Based on the metonymic principle, such a fragmentary text refers a reader to a certain whole featured by the literature of its part. On the other hand, nowadays the concept of a collection becomes the most effec- tive theoretical tool used to analyse literary anthologies. It has a long history dating back to the works of the 19th century authors (Honore de Balzac (Sánchez, 177), Jo- hann Wolfgang von Goethe (Sánchez, 257; Iampolski, 90-91; see also Goethe; Schel- lenberg)). Subsequently, the concept had been developed and established by Walter Benjamin (see Benjamin), Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard, 85-106), Werner Muenster- bergers (see Muensterbergers), Krzysztof Pomian (see Pomian 1996a, 1996b), Su- san Stewart (see Stewart), Susan Pearce (see Pearce), Boris Groys (see Groys, 1997a, 1997b), Paul van der Grijp (see Grijp), John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (see Elsner and Cardinal), and Yvette Sánchez (see Sánchez) until it turned into one of the key cultural concepts in James Clifford’s works (Clifford, 203-271). Each collection falls in line with a certain plot and envisages the perception, i.e. the ability to compre- hend and evaluate, classify and contextualize. Factuality is obvious, though it is not the only one and hardly the formal feature of such collections. Their value depends not only on the completeness but on the way this or that phenomenon is repre- sented, their potential to respond to new inquiries of the receptive community and the persuasiveness in creating new and complex narratives about its own cultural identity. Aleida Assmann was the first who applied the idea of collecting to literature. She considered the shift from a text to a collection as a sign indicating the transi- tion from structuralism to literary anthropology (Assmann, Gomille, Rippl 7-20). Finally, researchers such as Helga Essmann (see Essmann), William Germano (see Germano), Barbara Korte (see Korte), Jeffrey R. Di Leo (see Di Leo), Anne Ferry (see Ferry), Barbara Benedict (see Benedict) and Anders Olsson (see Olsson) focus their attention on the anthologies as a kind of a collection which not only reflects but sorts literature and serves as a means of both a compiler’s creative expression and a creation of a collective cultural identity. Anthology as a literary form opens new perspectives for research and formulates new inquiries; it not only reflects the past but forms the ways of interpreting the present and vision of the future. The German 49 Porównania_23.indd 49 2019-03-18 11:27:47 OLENA HALETA, A WRITER OR A CREATOR OF THE TEXTUAL WORLD… researcher, Henrike Schmidt, calls the anthology a performative and intertextual genre that provides self-understanding of literature; in other words, a genre that tells and explains readers what literature